Unequal treaty refers to any of a series of treaties signed with Western powers during the 19th and early 20th centuries by Qing dynasty China and late Tokugawa Japan after suffering military defeat by the foreign powers or when there was a threat of military action by those powers. The term is also applied to treaties imposed during the same time period on late JoseonKorea by the post-Meiji RestorationEmpire of Japan.

The historian Wang Dong concludes that "although the phrase has long been widely used, (unequal treaty) nevertheless lacks a clear and unambiguous meaning" and that there is "no agreement about the actual number of treaties signed between China and foreign countries that should be counted as 'unequal'."[3] The term "unequal treaty" did not come into use until early in the 20th century. These treaties were considered unequal in China "because they were not negotiated by nations treating each other as equals but were imposed on China after a war, and because they encroached upon China's sovereign rights ... which reduced her to semicolonial status". In many cases China was effectively forced to pay large amounts of reparations, open up ports for trade, cede or lease territories (such as Hong Kong to Great Britain and Macau to Portugal), and make various other concessions of sovereignty to foreign "spheres of influence", following military defeats.[4]

After World War I, patriotic consciousness in China focused on the treaties, which now became widely known as "unequal treaties". The Nationalist Party and the Communist Party competed to convince the public that their approach would be more effective.[6] Germany was forced to terminate its rights, the Soviet Union ostentatiously surrendered them, and the United States organized the Washington Conference to negotiate them. After Chiang Kai-shek declared a new national government in 1927, the western powers quickly offered diplomatic recognition, arousing anxiety in Japan.[7] The new government declared to the Great Powers that China had been exploited for decades under unequal treaties, and that the time for such treaties was over, demanding they renegotiate all of them on equal terms.[8] In the face of Japanese expansion in China, however, ending the system was postponed.[citation needed]

The unequal treaties ended at various times for the countries involved. Japan's victories in the 1894–95 First Sino-Japanese War convinced many in the West that unequal treaties could no longer be enforced on Japan. Korea's unequal treaties with European states became largely null and void in 1910, when it was annexed by Japan.[11]

^Yi, Kwang-gyu and Joseph P. Linskey. (2003). Korean Traditional Culture, p. 63., p. 63, at Google Books; excerpt, "The so-called Hanseong Treaty was concluded between Korea and Japan. Korea paid compensation for Japanese losses. Japan and China worked out the Tien-Tsin Treaty, which ensured that both Japanese and Chinese troops withraw from Korea."

Korean Mission to the Conference on the Limitation of Armament, Washington, D.C., 1921–1922. (1922). Korea's Appeal to the Conference on Limitation of Armament. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. OCLC 12923609